Tickle yourself pink with colour printing

Take a look around. Colour has infiltrated the printing world. Research has shown that using colour in business documents can have measurable results. Colour is not merely decoration; it informs, organises, emphasises and identifies. It reduces complex information to a single image that can be understood at a glance.

Yet colour still looks like a choice, feels like an option, and seems like a decision you have to make every time you create a new document. Countless companies of all shapes and sizes have been burned by broken promises of easy, fast and affordable colour printing. Colour printers or multifunction products are introduced into the office environment at very reasonable prices and then the business has to pay through its teeth for high-priced consumables, expensive repairs and lengthy services; all the while losing valuable production time due to slow print speeds, and suffering the effects of poor quality prints.

Unfortunately, once burned, twice shy means that these organisations are wary of investing in colour printing to any great degree. However, there are several reasons why you should not put out your white flag of surrender just yet.

Technological advancements such as solid ink are enabling higher quality colour prints at lower prices.

Rob Abraham, MD, Bytes Document Solutions

Traditional four-pass laser printers are capable of producing near-photographic quality colour prints, but they have disappointed consumers because of their lack of speed and high total cost of ownerships that result from applying four colours of ink, one at a time, with microscopic precision. This process increases printing times, the chances of badly aligned colours and the uneven use of inks. The complexity of these printers also adds to their overall cost and maintenance.

On the other hand, single-pass colour printing enables inexpensive, fast and superior quality colour printing. Single-pass colour laser printing uses four lasers, four separate toner cartridges and four rotating photo conductor drums. The toner cartridges and drums are placed along the path the paper follows as it moves through the printer, while the drums pick up all four colours of toner before transferring them, at the same time, onto the paper. This process enables high-speed colour printing, with little waste of ink and less wear and tear on the printer parts.

Similar to single-pass laser printing, LED colour printing replaces the four lasers in the single-pass machine with four strips made up of thousands of individual light-emitting diodes which perform the same function as the lasers, drawing patterns on four separate drums, one for each toner colour. Again, costs of printing are reduced while speed and quality are improved.

Of all the technology moving colour printing into our homes and offices, solid ink is leading the way in making it easier and cheaper to print in colour. Instead of toner or liquid ink, the colours come in the form of solid blocks of resin-based ink. This ink remains in solid form until heated to the specific temperature that turns it to liquid, and then instantly turns back to solid form when printed. It is applied through a precise stainless steel print head with tiny holes smaller than a human hair. This head uses 1 236 nozzles to jet more than 30 million drops of ink per second onto the heated drum, where it remains in a malleable state until transferred onto the paper.

Solid ink printers consist of only three major assemblies: the print head which applies ink to the print drum; the print drum which transfers the image to paper; and the controller, the brain of the printer that converts data from the computer to information required to print the image on paper.

Solid ink printers are easy to use and maintain. Ink loading is simple as each colour has a unique shape-coded and numbered ink stick to ensure the right colour goes into the right place. Wastage is reduced as every last drop of the ink stick is used and each stick is cheaper to buy than having to replace an entire cartridge (refilled or new).

With solid ink, the cost and wastage of consumables is reduced as each solid ink block is used in its totality and there is no need to refill cartridges or replace toner drums. The only consumable in a solid ink printer is a maintenance kit, which is an annual purchase; and solid ink printing produces 90% less waste than laser printers, again reducing costs.

Technological advancements such as solid ink are enabling higher quality colour prints at lower prices. The speed of solid ink colour printing has improved dramatically and the page-per-minute output of these printers is no longer significantly slower than monochrome printers. The solid ink printing engine is capable of printing 24 pages per minute (ppm) at full speed, versus the 12 to 17ppm for many colour lasers.

Increasing customer demand, and ongoing research and development, are bringing down the barriers to colour printing. With the technological advancements of single-pass printing, LED printing and solid ink, colour printing is truly more accessible and easier to use in busy office environments and at home. Painting the town red no longer needs to cost your soul.